344 WILD SPORTS IN TIIE FAR WEST. 



fully, and told him in few words how it had all happened. 

 The old man scolded, and said it served us right ; there 

 was no great danger in sticking a knife into a bear's 

 paunch, when he is falling, with the dogs upon him, 

 but if he has been thrown, and then catches sight of 

 his greatest enemy, man, he exerts all his force to attack 

 him, and woe to him who comes within reach of liis 

 paws. It was all very well talking ; he had not been 

 present, and seen one dog after another knocked over 

 never to rise again ; five minutes more, and not one 

 would have been saved, and who knows whether the 

 enraged beast would not have attacked us, then. 



Meantime, the Indians had been digging a grave with 

 their tomahawks. Wrapping the body in a blanket, 

 they laid him in it, and covered him with earth and 

 heavy stones. Conwell cut down some young stems, 

 and made a fence round the solitary grave. I could 

 not avoid a shudder at the quiet coolness of the whole 

 proceeding, as the thought struck me, that the same 

 persons, under the same circumstances, would have 

 treated me in the same cool way, had I fallen instead 

 of Erskine. Like me, he was a lonely stranger in a 

 foreign land, having left England some years before, 

 and his friends and relations will probably never know 

 what has become of him. Thousands perish in this 

 way in America, of whom nothing more is heard, and 

 perhaps in a few months the remembrance of them lias 

 entirely passed away. 



After the dead was quietly laid in the grave, Wachiga 

 came with an elderly Indian to look at my arm. 

 "Wachiga moved it, while the other looked steadfastly 

 in my face : the pain was enough to drive me mad, but. 



